PAUL KHAHLISO

there lingers an unspecific relationship between ruins and memory and even though ruins cannot be assigned to individuals it was individuals who crafted the spirit of any place and its episodic memories these memories float like enigmatic artifacts unearthed esoterically by those scaling geographical or spiritual ruins hair raising ghostly purrs that haunt archeologists and anyone obsessed with rocks in orchestrated form And a ruin as formation from a past untraceable any presumable destruction of the original structures is also etched within its embossed corners of memories therefore would any visible traces of past memories recorded or otherwise recalled become impediment to formations of new memories? And when ruins are consciously revived and excavated as object of venerable beauty devoid of innate beauty but purified by a new aesthetic appreciation for decay such an experience ought be captured in filmic impurity by a filmmaker who has translated the invisible to the visible Ruins Rider is a form of deification of spoliation of monumental architecture that symbolized affluence of an elitist civilization perhaps But perhaps a visual excavation of spirits in a metaphorical audio-visual archeology entranced by multiple layers of memories viewed from a mystified vantage point flickering color eerie multi-layered imagery of memory in conflict and recollection as a mental mosaic that often rouses visual simulacra that are fluid and chromatically disorienting these and other sensations are rooted in the oneiric nature of remembering decay as represented in Pierre-Luc Vaillancourt’s Ruins Rider.

in this audio-visual artwork said to have been filmed “in the Balkan wilderness” the artist appears to invade various lamenting spaces with their innate cues to trigger memories seeming to possess also an examinable trance nature where presences are felt in their assumed absences Ruins Rider is such a dream (Akashic) record which captures estimations of existent other(post)worldly shells of spirits proposing for viewers and co-experiencers to coin fresh optical stratagems for reflecting on hinted invisibles Hovering on the edge of a trance are images on the threshold of a disturbed dream richly colored aberrations fleeting with sonic fragmentations static hiss and noise compositions to form a non-static narrative anon static narra tive as I sit bracing each nerve for the following bend of light other syllables of past hymns to drown me in a sound stream orchestrated by musical waves that invoke paralysis; by the end of this expedition a droning black poses its sickness as a relief from 49 minutes of being lost
in time.

RAW POWER

Energy release, rigorous temper, violence as hallucinogen dilation sends eyes pulsating in visual streaks of skin dancing in a ring of rage; RAW POWER is trippy and on the brink of an emergency. Smeared across a screen exhibiting is an image that at first doesn’t appropriate anything or action, until slight movement of angle of view connects us to the visceral experience of a boxer in full exertion, in a state distinct from sleep but on that verge of spectral dissolution. Eventually, with a negligible merger of sound with image, random speckles whirling in circular lines emerge, orderly strokes akin to a Jackson Pollok painting fill a cathode frame with movements, motion beyond spectral confines. Rogue imagery of a person in violent excesses, irreducible and independent of translation, RAW POWER is a metaphor on the luxury of violence, its induced trance a testament to the transience of all human activity. There is a circle; an inlet of air at the heart of this whirlpool or hurricane winging in circles its soot around a nucleus of tension. In a sense, Pierre-Luc Vaillancourt’s RAW POWER is perception of a boxer in fluid continuum, without persistence but allowing images to flow in a river of dance, violent as it might be, but still a dance, a motion towards a dissolution of identifiable reality. Shadowboxing? Arms and fists as Liquid Swords? Swords swung like brush strokes in a calligrapher’s grasp? What is happening here? A Meditation On Violence?

HYPNAGOGIA

Something volcanic spewing,
strobes on screen like violent
colours of a rupture and sound
harnessing terror upwelling
from convergent layers of a
state before dreaming in explosions.

Here it seems yet another celestial body
is probed by Vaillancourt’s mastering of
the oneiric, hazards and eruptions of
memory, the landscape looks “unearthical”.

Black-body radiation on edges of undefined
contours, a kind of fuel for the hallucination
at play, temperate and blue and orange and
purple with crimson veneer pulsating to
a rhythm of light as brush strokes on cathode.

Then some inverted symphony lays an aural
foundation that provides unsmooth glides
into a somewhat irrational narrative (or non-narrative?),
through which to sail an unknown dimension
hidden within each hypnotically flashed image.

Yet, the eye embraces a chorus of disarray,
allowing the assault to slide like magma
into crevices of numbed minds.

And what does the word HYPNOGOGIA mean?
I wondered, when recently was introduced to this
film art encounter. I found out it has to do with sleep…
or a state before sleep. If in sleep one’s brain

deletes excess information, then it follows that
a medley of hues would blaze with flames that
consumes images, emotions, fleeting moments
tasted and soon discarded.

Pierre-Luc Vaillancourt’s filmic art is a sensorial
engagement that dares one to question all keys to
the doors of perception, a plunge into blind fate,
unassailably divergent, but thriving within a solemn
geometry of limited vision and thought.

As electric as his images yawn a new breath unto
sight, the aural is an inhalation of scents beyond the
gates of consciousness and unconsciousness,
which pursues into a clutter of debris that
which becomes the final calm.

But there are no absolutes in his imagery,
imagery that prays to be released from images,
images imprisoned in a screen that is a
firmament upon which memory is captured
never to reach us in time.

Again, exhausted, mind frosted with ash from
exploded consciousness, and fading into
reverberations of this compendium of film art,
I wonder if I were not a dreamer with defects
of recollection, an amnesiac on the verge
of another dream within a dream.

This is when cinema takes on the séance
with the material, when mind and orchestrated
sights dance as though they were cousins
in a murder of reality, of the GOD OF THE

PERCEIVED, a penetration behind the winds
of puppet vision, behind shawls of ghosts
simmering in rocks, laden on landscapes and
hiding among prism coloured shrubs.

These film artworks are a punch in the etheric
face of conservative ingestion of sensory data,
some sobering slap on any puritanical view
of sanctity and vulgarity.